The Ghost Adventures team traveled to Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Saturday night to do some paranormal investigating in multiple locations in the first of a two-part episode featuring this historic southern city. As always, Zak Bagans, Aaron Goodwin, Billy Tolley, and Jay Wasley discovered plenty of paranormal evidence of hauntings in two locations during the first installment of this Ghost Adventures episode, but they also broke some new ground in the paranormal investigation field with a completely new investigative technique.

Instead of simply relying on devices that can allow spirits to channel their energy into communicating, Ghost Adventures went a step further and used paranormal technology to create their own “vortex” of energy in the hope it would add more energy that spirits could manipulate. And judging from the results, that’s exactly what some spirits in Vicksburg did, and they did it on camera.

If you haven’t seen the most recent episode of Ghost Adventures in Vicksburg, suffice it to say that spoilers follow.

While there are plenty of historic southern cities that people think of when they think of hauntings and ghost tours, such as New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, South Carolina, many may not be aware of the bloody history of Vicksburg, in the context of the Civil War. Vicksburg sits at the southern tip of the great Mississippi Delta and was considered a crucial location strategically during the Civil War. Many battles were fought there and many lives were lost.

In the first of two Ghost Adventures episodes filmed there, paranormal investigators Zak, Aaron, Billy, and Jay investigated an abandoned building that used to be the Elks Lodge, and the abandoned Kuhn Memorial Hospital. They were also joined at the Elks Lodge by their tech guru/gadget creator, Bill Chappell, who set up several tech devices in a circle to create the energy vortex, as well as instruments to document much more data than most paranormal teams gather with any of the current equipment available. This included readings for such things as humidity and barometric pressure, which showed significant changes that coincided with a poltergeist-type event.

While Zak was leading the investigation, a huge 4 x 4 board in the background fell over on camera. Sure, boards can fall over, but what was most compelling about the evidence was a close-up, slow-motion shot that showed the board not only falling over but twisting as it fell in a manner that didn’t seem entirely natural. Ghost Adventures also captured a pretty clear EVP when they first entered the building, so there was some major paranormal activity at that location.

Aaron and Jay locked down in Kuhn Memorial Hospital for this Ghost Adventures investigation, but it’s debatable as to how much of the activity there was paranormal or more of a human persuasion. As Aaron did a thermal scan of the building in the darkness, he later saw a very bright red figure that appeared to be human at the far end of the hallway. As pointed out at that moment in the Ghost Adventures episode, the presence of human intruders on the site can be just as menacing — if not more so — than anything that is possibly paranormal, depending on their motivation and mindset. That mindset may still be a mystery, as Aaron and Jay did not run into whoever has been squatting at the old hospital, but they did find the remains of some of their bodily functions in plastic bags.

This episode of Ghost Adventures proved that human beings can be far scarier than the paranormal, presuming the pile of excrement wasn’t of an otherworldly nature. Either that or ghosts can poop. Take your pick.

Ghost Adventures airs Saturday nights on the Travel Channel, and the second part of the Vicksburg investigation airs on Saturday, October 21.